Day 3 - Long Island

Day 3 - His. The great tradition here is the family barbecue. Well, the family barbecue, getting up too early and waiting for people to arrive. I never really understood jet lag until i started travelling here - I had heard about it - mostly in really bad sitcoms - but it kind of kicks in when you know it is midday in reality but all the clocks say seven. mostly we are lead to believe time is some kind of constant - but it just isn't true. Try spending some time being bored and you will realise how long an hour can be - some hours last a life time. Equally when your having fun days just fly by. All this causality nonsense leads us to believe time just ticks by at the same rate everywhere - it just doesn't. If you want proof of this try spending a Saturday morning here. The day starts at the wrong time and then it drips by like treacle until we go out when it just flies. Equally when everybody arrives it speeds past at an unbelievable rate until it's time to go to the beach and sunbathe when it slows down again and becomes so thick you can hardly move through it. Moment by moment until the barbecue when it all speeds up again and everything becomes normal - what ever that is. So, everybody arrived/arrives today. Another really curious thing about time. In my mind at least it lacks sequence and sometimes it's hard to decide which came first the gram cracker or the hershey bar. One of the things we cook at the beach barbecue is s'mores. They are cooked  marshmallow, chocolate and gram cracker sandwiches (gram crackers are a kind of square digestive biscuit) they are sweet, sticky and incredibly filling. But the most curious thing about them is that the cracker is just the right size for a hershey bar - so which came first, the hershey or the cracker? - these are the deep philosophical problems one must struggle with here. The beach cook out starts with a bonfire - the younger guys set of to collect wood, pile it high and soak it with enough lighter fuel to ensure worried parents. By the time we arrive with the great heaps of necessary paraphernalia the fire is roaringly high and we spread out and try to cook hot dogs without losing too much of our own eyebrows. There are two types of cooking forks - short ones and long ones and the trick is to get a long fork while looking like you don't care if you get a long fork. Of course, everybody cares, but it would be social death to show you did. After we have eaten we chill and watch the sun go down, sipping, in  my case at least, root beer. Root beer is another of those great American inventions i truly appreciate. It tastes like antiseptic and i am almost sure it rots your teeth but i can't get enough of the stuff - i think it is banned in europe because the main ingredients are carcinogenic, so the only place to get it is here and i love the stuff. I must be braver than i thought, I won't use a rope swing but i am happy to swig gallons of gut rot and risk a tumour. The only other thing we did yesterday was go to Greenport and buy a penknife. When we pack we do so with the aid of lists. The idea of lists is to ensure nothing is forgotten. The reality of lists is to ensure lots of things are forgotten. In our case we forgot wooly hats and penknives. So part of Saturday's mission was to get these things and look at Greenport - just to check nothing has changed. unfortunately things have changed. It is always a disappointment to find things have changed. But that is the nature of things and in this case the arcade has shut. The arcade is like a poundsaver on steroids, full of those intriguing little bits and pieces that no one could possibly use but were huge fun to look at and think about buying. I suppose if people did more buying and less looking it would still be there. But then there are only so many tin bucket plant stands and plastic hoops you can possibly use.  Time definitely has a curious property here - that of course, maybe because the big decisions of the day consist of whether to have fritos or fruit loops for breakfast and a hour on the porch watching squirrels play in the yard and drinking coffee is about as dangerous as it gets!